April 20, 2018

W is still worse (open thread)

by Ugh

While there's a lot of norm breaking, rampant corruption, and likely a fair bit of criminality, Trump still has a ways to go before he reaches the truly great heights of horribleness that was the W administration. Hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily dead people, for example, plus torture and a number of other things I'm sure I've forgotten. But hey, Trump has lots of time left in his first term!

80 degrees here in DC last Friday, 45 degrees today, it's the hippies fault, I'm told. The major banks saved something like $4 billion in federal taxes from the TCJA in the first quarter of 2018 alone. Phew, I was worried about them. Hey look another school shooting, so please reset your "don't politicize the tragedy" clocks to two weeks before we're allowed to talk about gun control, per the NRA.

Started listening to the What Were You Thinking podcast. Halfway through the first episode and it has some very interesting insights into how teenagers (actually categorized as 13-24 year olds) make decisions, like joining ISIS. Good stuff.

Comments

Open Thread -- In the on-going compilation of
You Can't Make This Stuff Up

One of the Republican Senate candidates in West Virginia is Don Blankenship. Who is recently out of prison, where he was doing time for violating worker safety regulation in his mine. For obvious reasons, he is not the darling of the Republican establishment.

He has just struck back at the establishment by denouncing Senate Majority Leader McConnell for conflict of interest . . . because "his father-in-law is a wealthy Chinaperson." (In case anyone has missed it, Mrs. McConnell is Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation. She was brought to the US as a child from China.)

So far, so xenophobic. Hardly worthy of mention. The You Can't Make This Stuff Up part comes from the fact that Blankenship's own fiancee was also born in China! Which would seem to make his prospective father-in-law a "Chinaperson", too.

I’d rather stick this in a more recent open thread, but this seems to be itge most recent one. Anyway, here is, for a change, an optimistic view of America’s future by James Fallows about how local communities are bypassing our national political dysfunction

You know, novakant, it's perfectly possible to be extremely worried about and horrified by Trump's Iran stance, Israel stance etc (and I am), and still welcome and see the value of articulate and potentially persuasive Trump critics like Frum who nonetheless disagree on these points. However, for those who are all-or-nothing, I can see this is not viable. But rather than trying to bludgeon those of us who do not agree with your approach, I imagine you take comfort from those like the author of your Salon piece who evidently feels exactly as you do. Good. Each to their own.